Page 61 of So in Love
11
Crystal strolledinto her meeting with Darryl wearing a faint smile and humming a song in her head.He was waiting for her in the conference room, also smiling.
“Good morning.Did you have a nice weekend?”he asked.
“I did, thanks.”She realized she meant it wholeheartedly.She’d spent a fantastic weekend with Jamie.They’d gone to the zoo up in Portland with Alaina, Evan, and Alexa and then Jamie had taken her to Huber’s for dinner so that she could experience the fabulous Spanish coffee demonstration for herself.She’d tried to convince him to let her spring for a fancy hotel room downtown, but he’d insisted on driving her home to his loft where they’d slept until nearly noon on Sunday.Okay, there’d been more than sleeping, but probably best not to think of that just now.
She and Darryl had work to do!“So tell me what you’ve got,” she said, taking a seat at the table.
“I think I found the mother lode—at least with regard to your Dorinda story.”
“Oh wow, that’s great.”Especially since Crystal hadn’t achieved much—any, really—success with her cold-calling Fosters in the Syracuse area.She’d exhausted Syracuse proper and some of the surrounding areas and was beginning to lose hope, so this was spectacular news.
“In searching newspapers in upstate New York, I found something published in 1918.”He opened his trusty file folder and handed her a photocopy of an old article.“Go ahead and read it.”
The piece was several paragraphs.She forced herself to carefully read every word and not skim as she was tempted to get to the punch line.Bad habit from reading too many scripts.
It was written by someone with seemingly no relation to the Fosters—the byline was Henrietta Wilcox.That a woman had authored the story was amazing.
The story told of a young woman from a poor family outside Syracuse who, seeing no potential in her current surroundings, went West in 1878 with her brother to find their fortunes.A family friend had settled a town in rural Oregon and encouraged them to come.
Crystal looked up at Darryl.“This is so cool—it’s like finding that puzzle piece that fell under the table.”
He chuckled.“Good analogy.”
“It reads like a story, not a news article.”
“It does,” Darryl said with a nod.“I see that a lot in old newspapers—the historical equivalent of a human interest story.”
That made sense.Going back to reading, Crystal had to remind herself again to go slow.She didn’t want to miss anything in her excitement.Not that she wouldn’t likely read this a thousand times.
The woman settled in Oregon where she married a man she met there.They built a farm, but things didn’t go well, and he died not too long after they married.Crystal wondered about their romantic story—had they fallen in love?Had they fallen in like and sort of paired up to face the hardships of living in the rural West?The storyteller in her, which she now realized existed, was already spinning a tale of what she might put in the screenplay.She liked the latter, with them ultimately falling in love and then tragedy ripping them apart when Hiram got sick.
But she was totally losing focus now.She shook her head and started reading again.
The woman, who the author only referred to as “D,” wrote to her New York relatives, but no one had enough money to bring her home.Her brother, who’d gone to Oregon with her, had also died.Destitute, she turned her home—the only thing of value she had—into a boardinghouse.
Unfortunately, that seemed to have failed too, because at some point, the boardinghouse became a brothel.Crystal ignored the author’s condescending tone, certain that Dorinda hadn’t made that decision lightly.She’d tried other measures, and they’d failed.Crystal wasn’t going to judge, not when women’s choices were so limited in that time.Hell, women’s choices werestilllimited in many ways in many places.
The next paragraph dealt with the fallout from the brothel—some folks in the town weren’t happy about it.In fact, the mayor had threatened her on more than one occasion, a fact the author of the article had read verbatim from D’s letters to her family in New York, which was how Henrietta had learned of the story.
There were letters!Or at least there had been in 1918.Crystal longed to find if they were extant.
She looked over at Darryl again.“I would love to get my hands on these letters.”
He grinned.“I knew you’d say that.I’m working on it—and you can too by calling the rest of those Fosters.In the meantime, I’m putting together a list of other descendants whose names aren’t Foster.I should have that for you next week and then you can start calling them.”
“Excellent.”She could hardly wait.If she could get those letters, written in Dorinda’s hand… She’d know the woman as well as she ever could.
“So you read the part about the mayor threatening her?”Darryl asked.
“Yes.Those Stowes really were assholes, pardon my French.”She felt bad for Jamie.
“No need to censor yourself around me.I’ve called them much worse.”
The story concluded the way Crystal expected, that the brothel had been destroyed by a fire in 1902 and D had died—“a tragic end to a tragic life,” Henrietta wrote rather dramatically.There was, however, no mention of the KKK or why they’d burned down the brothel.That was perhaps a mystery they’d never solve.
Crystal sat back in her chair.“I wish we knew why the KKK torched the brothel.”
